These they would drag to their head-quarters and hold to
ransom.
The air was filled with tales of the frightful barbarities practised by
the Norman nobles on the unhappy English captives in the depths of their
gloomy castles. "They carried off," says the Saxon chronicle, "all who
they thought possessed any property, men and women, by day and by night;
and whilst they kept them imprisoned, they inflicted on them tortures,
such as no martyr ever underwent, in order to obtain gold and silver
from them." We must be excused from quoting the details of these
tortures.
"They killed many thousands of people by hunger," continues the
chronicle. "They imposed tribute after tribute upon the towns and
villages, calling this in their tongue _tenserie_. When the citizens had
nothing more to give them, they plundered and burnt the town. You might
have travelled a whole day without finding a single soul in the towns,
or a cultivated field. The poor died of hunger, and those who had been
formerly well-off begged their bread from door to door. Whoever had it
in his power to leave England did so. Never was a country delivered up
to so many miseries and misfortunes; even in the invasions of the pagans
it suffered less than now.
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